Blog

5 Best Practices for Effective Lead Management

Created on: Thursday, November 01, 2018

Generating leads and patients is the only way your practice will thrive in a competitive market. And if you’re having a hard time tracking leads, seeing where they’re coming from, or if they’re converting into patients, then you’re probably not practicing good lead management.

In order to drive returning patients and revenue, you need effective lead management. Below we outline five tips for generating leads, tracking them through your sales funnel, and reporting on their effectiveness.

1. Create a Plan

When a prospective patient fills out a form on your website, what happens? Who follows up with them? How do you know if they’re ready for a consultation versus just gathering information?

If you or your team are unsure what to do or how to proceed, then you might be losing leads and potential revenue.

To prevent leads from falling through the cracks, create a one-page plan that explains what should happen the minute a lead enters your pipeline. (We recommend keeping it to one-page because you can keep it by your desk or display in a common area.) Your plan should include the various steps and stages that a lead goes through when becoming a patient.

These steps/stages can be both internal (what your team does) and external (what a patient does) so everyone has a good understanding of the entire sales process.

2. Define Each Stage of Your Sales Funnel

Just like you want to understand how a lead works through your sales process, you also want to know what each stage of your sales process means.

When a lead first comes in through your website, what stage are they in? Probably something like Discovery or Needs Appointment/Consultation. This means someone needs to call and engage with that lead as soon as possible, to schedule a consultation.

Not only do you want to know the actions someone (both the lead and your team) is taking in this first stage but also the questions and decisions that might occur here to move them to the next stage.

This will help you better prepare for your consultations, give leads a better experience with your team, and increase your chances of moving them to the next stage.

3. Align Sales and Marketing Teams

If you think you don’t have a sales team, think again. Everyone on your staff is essentially a salesperson. They’re selling your practice, your services, your thought leadership, every time they are in contact with a prospective or current patient. They just don’t do it in a traditional sales way.

Your marketing team (whether it’s in house or you use an agency) and your sales team (you and your staff) should be working together to fine tune how prospective patients work through your process to become a patient. Things to talk about include:

What questions prospective patients ask during their consultations? If you consistently hear the same questions, add them to your website. Or add it to their consultation reminder email. This will help streamline the consultation so you can focus more on getting them to schedule their procedure.

Are the leads qualified? Are these leads your ideal customer? And if not, why? Your Marketing team can take this information to see if they’re coming from a specific campaign and how they can tweak it to attract ideal patients instead.

Are leads coming in? If your marketing team is having a hard time generating leads for your practice, talking with your sales team (staff) can give them ideas on where to advertise, content to produce, and add text to get visitors to your website and into your funnel.

4. Understand Your Ideal Customer

Understanding your target audience is key to creating compelling and attractive marketing campaigns. Without knowing who the right patient is, your marketing team can’t deliver them to you.

Take the time to write out who your ideal customer is. Describe who they are (their age, their gender, if they’re married/single or have kids/no kids), where they live (local, certain zip codes, state-wide), their hobbies, how they make decisions, the challenges they face and why they need you to overcome them, and how they search for information.

All of this information will help you craft marketing materials, draft speeches/pitches for your team to use when communicating with patients in the office, create automated emails to nurture your leads, and more.

Share the ideal customer with your sales and marketing teams. As leads come in, they can verify that they are a match and are good customers for your practice to have.

5. Use a CRM

Managing leads can get complicated really fast, especially when they’re all in different stages. And it’s not just the stages, it’s their contact information, marketing information (how they found you, first page seen, conversion history, etc.), and notes from your team.

Using a CRM makes lead management easier. You can not only have your leads entered into the system automatically, but also track them through the entire process. You can see if they came in through a specific marketing campaign, what form they filled out, send them emails and/or appointment reminders, and so much more.

Plus, the reporting functionality of your CRM can help you understand how many of your leads are converting into patients.

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Do you need help managing leads for your practice? Or want to get more insight into how your marketing campaigns are delivering leads? MDprospects can help you track new leads, send automated responders and provide real-time reporting so you can see what is happening anytime. Learn more about the features and benefits of MDprospects or schedule a free demo to see how this software can work for your practice.

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"MDprospects is a great tool that we use on a regular basis. I am a huge fan of the new filtering and exporting capabilities. Their team has a passion for making this easy and rewarding."

Chelsea AsmusOperations ManagerVance Thompson Vision

"We have recommended MDprospects as a lead management system to our clients in the refractive surgery sector and are pleased with the results. The system is affordable, user-friendly, web-based and semi-automated to facilitate follow-up with patient leads."